Making My Garden Grow Monday!

That's right, ladies and gentlemen, another weekly column! Actually, this is the second in a series of four columns I'm rolling out as I revamp my blog. Making My Garden Grow Monday is a chance for all of us bloggers to share what we've been working on in our yards and gardens throughout the week. Feel free to take my badge and link back to my blog so we can all keep up with each other!

The past two weeks have been busy here at Casa de Gnome, yard/garden-wise. On March 31 we finally had sod installed in our backyard. We have been in our home for almost 2 years and the whole time our backyard has been a combo of clay dirt (or mud, depending on the weather), weeds, and random grass that got blown onto our lot. Last year we added our raised vegetable garden bed, but otherwise the vegetation has been rather lacking. Here's a before and after shot:



It has been so nice to be able to walk barefoot through the grass and hang out in the yard this week! We've also been busy getting ready to start up our veggie garden for the season. We've procrastinated and had a bit of a late end to winter, so we decided to buy seedlings rather than start seeds ourselves this year. This week we hit up our local home improvement store for a variety of fruits, veggies and herbs.



We got 3 kinds of tomatoes, 3 kinds of peppers, okra, 2 kinds of squash, strawberries, cantelope, dill, thyme, sweet basil, cilantro, mint, and lavender. We will put them in the ground as soon as we finish this project:



We're building a split rail fence backed with fine-gauge chttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhicken wire to keep the dogs from getting into and digging up the garden. We had a lot of problems with that last year, so we're trying to improve things. The wire should be fine enough that we'll still be able to see through the fence so we can observe the plants all the way from the patio (where the above picture was taken from). Tyler is planning to finish up most of the fence this week, so we'll get the plants in the ground ASAP!

Until next week, happy gardening!!

PS: I'm going to be cross-posting my blog posts from my WordPress account for a week or two, and then I'll be moving over there permanently. Please update your bookmarks if you want to keep following me! http://gnomeintx.wordpress.com